IIT Bombay's TARA Mobile App Brings Oral Reading Fluency to the Forefront; Check Details Here

IIT Bombay has developed a mobile app, TARA, designed to assess students' reading proficiency by analysing recorded audio and generating detailed reports. Check details here

IIT Bombay's TARA Mobile App

To revolutionise literacy assessment in schools, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay have developed TARA (Teacher’s Assistant for Reading Assessment), a mobile app that evaluates students' reading proficiency through recorded audio and generates detailed reports eliminating the need for human intervention. The project, funded by the Tata Centre for Technology & Design and the Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation Fellowship, is led by Professor Preeti Rao from IIT Bombay's Electrical Engineering Department. She collaborated with language experts and teachers to develop TARA.

TARA Mobile App

The mobile app leverages advanced speech processing and machine learning technology to automatically measure oral reading fluency. Designed to address the need for regular assessments to enhance students' reading proficiency, TARA offers an efficient, automated solution. It listens to a child reading a level-appropriate passage aloud, analyzes the recorded audio, and generates a comprehensive report on the student's reading progress minimising time and human effort. TARA has been recently adopted by Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghatan (KVS) for English and Hindi ORF assessment for Classes 3 to 8, comprising more than seven lakh students in 1,200 schools across India.

Explaining the functions of TARA, the professor said, “From an audio recording of a child reading a level-appropriate passage aloud, TARA extracts rubrics for ORF including the widely employed WCPM (words correct per minute). With TARA, phrasing (grouping of words), intonation and stress in speech are also measured that helps obtain a holistic score indicative of the precise stage of reading development. The system is trained on expert-annotated recordings of children’s reading and currently works for English and Hindi, with its reliability verified to match that of human experts.”

Dr Shailaja Menon, reading pedagogy expert and lead, Center of Excellence in Early Language and Literacy at Tata Trusts, said, “Organisations have long felt the need for a digital tool offering real-time data on learning levels. TARA addresses this gap with an end-to-end system that facilitates audio recording and provides performance data for each child, as well as for cohorts such as class, school and region, on a dashboard.”

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